Multiband Accelerated Resting-State fMRI

A Siemens Magnetom Trio 3T whole body MRI scanner and a 32-channel head coil were used. Multi-band accelerated echo planar imaging sequencing (Center for Magnetic Resonance Research) was used with an acceleration factor of 6 and iPAT acceleration factor of 2. T2*-weighted EPI slices were obtained every 0.7 seconds (TR=0.7, TE=0.03), these parameters were optimized given our scanner capability and used to increase sampling rates and increase our power to detect resting state networks as has been shown previously with multiband (Xu et al., 2013 (link)) (Filippini et al., 2014 (link)). Fifty-four transverse slices with in-plane resolution of 2.4 x 2.4mm were attained and slice thickness was 2.4 mm. The matrix size was 96x96 and the field of view were 230x230 mm. Acquisition was performed during resting-state scan, yielding 400 volumes in total. Sagittal 3D MPRAGE images were also acquired with an isotropic in-plane resolution of 1x1x1 (TI=0.9 seconds, TR=2.02, flip angle 9°, FOV=250x250 mm) yielding 192 slices.